Royal Violets

Video installation

This work is driven by deterritorialization and how it relates to the disembedding of social and familial relations. I present the house where I was raised in Puerto Rico from three tightly framed perspectives, and the Pacific coast, where I now reside. In the house, I focus on elements of colonial furniture from the Caribbean. I am interested in the import and export of aesthetic commodities as a metaphor for Caribbean countries. I allude to woven cane, a craft that began in Cuba and was exported to the United States, and Royal Violets, a cuban cologne that was present in my childhood and which has also become a prevalent commodity outside the island. I am including the baby scent and the adult scent, as a way to allude to that lineage and to highlight the impact scent has on memory. The sound is displaced as well, made up of percussive elements that resemble sounds from nature and transition into the sound of the ocean. This work illustrates the displaced traces of the object that is lost; its constituents do not necessarily belong to one another.